Vitalik explores the foundation of Ethereum’s future scalability in his article “Ethereum welcomes blobs, where are we going next?” and proposes four major improvements for L2 protocol development: data compression, optimistic data technology, improvement of execution-related restrictions, and enhancement of security.
Improving L2 in Four Aspects
Data compression for more efficient use of bytes
Optimistic data technology, using L1 only in special cases to protect L2
Continuously improving execution-related restrictions
Continuously enhancing security
Ethereum towards a more comprehensive decentralized platform
On March 14th, Ethereum successfully completed the Dencun hard fork, laying the foundation for Ethereum’s future scalability with the introduction of blobs. On the 28th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote an article titled “Ethereum welcomes blobs, where are we going next?” to elaborate on Ethereum’s future development journey. He first mentioned that with the help of blobscriptions, the number of blobs has surged to a goal of 3 per block, leading to a “price discovery mode” for blob fees.
Moving forward, Vitalik stated that the key to Ethereum’s future scalability relies on rollups technology that supports data space and data availability sampling (DAS), with the next step being the use of “PeerDAS (conservative DAS)” to verify blobs, providing additional scalability capacity and introducing more advanced DAS versions in the future. Additionally, Vitalik pointed out four directions for improving L2 protocols, including data compression, optimistic data structure development, improvement in execution-related restrictions, and enhancement of security.
Data compression for more efficient use of bytes is crucial. Normally, a transaction requires about 180 bytes of data space. Through a series of compression techniques, this data volume can be significantly reduced, ideally to below 25 bytes per transaction. This compression can greatly enhance data storage and processing efficiency.
Plasma technology allows data to be retained in L2 under normal circumstances, relying on L1 only for security in special cases, providing equivalent security to some applications as Rollup. While Plasma cannot protect all assets, architectures inspired by Plasma can protect most assets. Vitalik suggested that L2s unwilling to put all data on-chain should explore such technologies.
With the launch of the Dencun hard fork, rollups using the introduced blobs became cheaper, leading to a surge in the transaction volume of L2 networks like Base, but they also encountered internal gas limitations, resulting in unexpected fee increases. Vitalik mentioned directions for improvement, including “parallel processing (rollups can implement similar to EIP-648)” and storage, as well as the interplay between computation and storage, which are significant engineering challenges that rollups face.
Vitalik stated that we are still far from a world where rollups rely entirely on code protection. Currently, only the following 5 rollups (of which only Arbitrum is fully EVM) have reached the “first stage”.
Vitalik emphasized the need to face this challenge and set up a security council that could only change code behavior under high thresholds (e.g., 6-of-8 proposed by Vitalik; 9-of-12 adopted by Arbitrum), even though complex optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verification code cannot yet be fully trusted.
The ecosystem’s standards need to become stricter, and we should only consider projects that have reached at least the first stage as rollups. Then, we can cautiously move towards the second stage: a rollup truly supported by code, where the security council can only intervene when the code is “obviously self-contradictory”. One way to achieve this security goal is to use multiple proof implementations.
In conclusion, as Ethereum transitions from the “fast L1 progress” era to a new stage where L1 progress remains important but more gradual, application developers are no longer just building prototypes but tools to serve millions of people. This requires an adjustment in the ecosystem’s mindset, transforming Ethereum from a purely financial ecosystem into a more comprehensive independent decentralized technology platform.